Best Friends (59 page)

It took me a moment to gather my thoughts.

“Please,” Aury said.

“It's not violent,” Stephanie assured me.

“Fine, fine,” I said.

“I wanted Mary to come with me today,” Ted said, “but she didn't want to.”

“Good,” I said wildly. “Excellent.”

“She respects our position.”

“Good. That's nice, yes. Aury,” I called, “come help me get your stuff out of the car.”

She danced along beside me. “I can see
The Secret
? I can really see
The Secret
? ”

“Sure,” I said, “why not? Let's go mad.”

We brought Aury's knapsack and doll carrier back to Ted. “So this is definite?” I said.

A smile crossed his lips. “I know how you like definites,” he said.

His gaze wavered, but his voice was annoyed. “It has to be, Clare, don't you see?”

I didn't want to stop looking at him. “Ted,” I said. I loved to say his name.

“You'll be busy with your move.” He flicked a hand and turned away from me. “We've got to go. Girls!” he called, “I want everybody climbing in the van like nice little monkeys!”

“We're not monkeys!” all his girls squealed merrily, and then they clambered in the van and drove away.

 

 

 

FRANK HAD VISITED BAXTER. Baxter had a new friend living with him at the cabin, but the afternoon Frank visited, the friend felt sick and never emerged from his bedroom.

“You didn't even meet him?” I said. “Wow. How'd our family end up so goofy?”

“We're not goofy!” Frank retorted hotly. “I'm married, Eric's married, you're a doctor. So Larry Lumberjack has a shy roommate, does that make our whole family goofy?”

“You don't think Baxter's—” but I didn't have time to finish.

“You are absolutely obsessed with perversion!” Frank burst out. “Can't a fellow be a bachelor anymore?”

 

 

 

I WAS SLIPPING OUT the ICU doors when the daughter marched up to me. “Okay. Now that everybody knows, now that everything's out in the open, my brothers and I believe we should get the AIDS test too.”

I was due at the closing in twenty minutes. “Your odds of picking up HIV from a family member without sexual contact are infinitesimal.”

“But we're talking about our father and our mother, we shared a bathroom when we visited, we ate together—”

“You don't catch HIV by casual contact.” I looked at her skeptical face. “If you insist on getting the blood test, your best bet is the health department downtown.”

“Can't you write an order and we'll go to the lab here?”

“I can't write an order for something you don't need. And the testing should be anonymous. You can go to the health department. Getting involved in this whole thing would be”—I smiled apologetically as I backed away—“a waste of time for me.”

“I can't believe this.”

“I'm sorry, but I'm running late to a meeting. If you're really against going to the health department, why don't you call your family doctor?”

“Never mind. I'm sorry I asked you. I understand.”

 

 

 

“I'M CALLING FROM the new house! It's beautiful, we love it. It's a great day here, feels like May instead of March, Mom's sitting out in the backyard and Aurelia's on a glider beside her reading
The Hobbit.
Yeah, yeah, new start in life, you know about that. What are you doing? You're on the computer? Oh no! You're talking to the Web Reb again? At least your modem has a dedicated phone line, otherwise I'd never be able to get through. How are you? I haven't heard from you in ages. Are you okay? You don't sound like yourself, you sound like—you're kidding. He left? He moved in with his girlfriend? What's a grown man like Peter doing abandoning his wife and six children? Has he gone totally insane?”

I hesitated a moment. “Sally, you still have me. Do you want me to come visit?”

I didn't get there till late June—problems with getting infectious disease to cover my patients—and Aury, with all her swim meets, had to stay home in Ohio. It was 1995. My second visit to Idaho.

“Listen to this.” Sally opened a book of poetry. “ ‘The one who waits is always the mother'—here's the line I love: ‘all her fingers jammed in the automatic doors of the world.' ” She looked up to be sure I'd gotten it. “I love that line! I love it!”

Linnea made a sound, picked up her bowl of cornflakes, and overturned it on her head.

“Linnea, that is not appropriate.” Sally picked up the bowl and went to the sink for a dish towel, which she brought back and laid on the table in front of her daughter. “Wipe off your head, please.”

Linnea did as she was told, swabbing her hair, at Sally's prompting picking out the soggy cornflakes from behind her ears and laying them in Sally's palm. To me, Linnea was an eerie child: she was two and a half years old and seemed intelligent, yet she didn't utter a word.

“You think the husband's going to let Laurie go just like that?” Sally snapped her fingers. “Fat chance. They've got a prenup! She won't get the house, income, nada. That scares me. You think she'll want to stick around here and live with Peter? Does Peter want to stay around here? He says he does, but I don't want him running off and leaving our kids without a father.”

“Sally, plenty of kids grow up without a father.”

“No offense to you, but don't you think Aury's more balanced since she's been seeing Ted? On the phone, she sounds much happier, even though it's made things more complicated for you. Peter's not a bad man. He's a foolish man, but he's not a worthless father.”

This surprised me, because I had always thought Peter was worthless as a father. His eagerness to please seemed to extend only to adults. He never changed a diaper, read a story, or spooned food into a waiting mouth. “He never took a really active role with the kids,” I hazarded.

“No, but he was there,” Sally answered quickly. “And he'll be better now. Not having the kids with him all the time, he'll realize what he's given up.”

“Hmmm,” I said, unconvinced, and it hit me what a web of illusions Sally lived in. I thought of Ben's tooth. I'd taken to bringing it with me. Was I as deluded as she was? Were there obvious things I couldn't see? Would I want someone to tell me?

Sally turned away from me with a fierce look. “Maybe I'll offer him alimony. Contingent on his staying near here.”

 

 

 

I'D LOOKED UP FROM the letter, my mouth dry. “She says I was very attentive to her mother.”

“Her mother was unconscious,” Mr. Kapstone, the medical center president, snapped. “She needed you to be attentive to her.”

“I didn't handle it properly,” I admitted. “I should have ordered the HIV tests for her and her brothers. I was wrong.”

“We can't afford wrong in this medical center. Not with people of this caliber.”

“Not with people of any caliber, I hope.”

The air between us seemed to bristle.

“I'll tell her you admit your mistake,” Mr. Kapstone said. “That's something.”

 

 

 

“DID I TELL YOU that the principal said Ezra was too bright for school?” Sally's voice, mocking the principal's, took on a prissy whine. “‘We're lacking the staffing to give him opportunities to challenge himself.' Bitch. She had the gall to suggest homeschooling. Look, I said, I could homeschool him, it'd be fine, he and I would have fun and he'd learn what he needs to know but that's not the point. The point is a parent will not be around forever, and I want him to know how to get along with other teachers, other kids, everybody! I said to the principal, my dad's a vegetable, my mom is dead, my brother is dead—what if I were helpless in the world? I'm training my kids to survive after I'm gone.” She jabbed the air with her finger. A thrill ran through me: Had she really called Sid a vegetable? “Then I said listen, my kids are all bright, and they know about good things, and half the reason they're turning out okay is they don't watch TV. TV is a scourge. It's hideous!” I suddenly saw her as she'd been twenty years before, pacing our dorm room, railing about the idiocy of Anaïs Nin. “Why are you smiling? You know it's true. It's just something you can't voice to people, they'll think you're sanctimonious.”

“Aren't you?”

She couldn't stifle a small smile, but then she erased it. “Is sanctimony bad? At least it's honest. At least it's trying for some kind of purity of feeling. And that's the problem with TV, it's not honest. TV takes everything—death, passion, perversion—and turns it into a show. It turns pain into entertainment.”

I made some kind of neutral, soothing face.

“It makes us all voyeurs,” Sally said, her voice firmer. “We're supposed to sit and watch.”

I nodded ever so slightly.

“I should know!” Sally said, biting off her words. Her tone softened now, her message completed: “I should know. I made sex into a spectacle, didn't I? Just like my father.” She threw her gaze angrily around her house. “And look where it got me.”

It was the same lovely rustic house. Her kids were the same animated children. She still had enough money that she would never need to work. The only difference was that Peter was gone. And the old Sally, in a way, was back.

 

 

 

“OH NO, NO, we're not vegetarians,” she was saying later. “It's that we've been eating meat in a sacramental sort of way. Like in ‘She'll be Coming Around the Mountain': ‘Oh, we'll kill the old red rooster when she comes.' ‘When she comes' is a meaningful event. To kill the rooster is an honor attended
her.
So you're the lady in the song.”

“You're going to kill a rooster for me?”

Thankfully, Sally laughed. “We're not that literal yet. We went to the supermarket and bought chicken. For chicken cacciatore.” Her tone sobered. “Maybe someday we'll be that literal. I am trying to observe the Shabbos, did I tell you that?”

“I did that once.” We looked at each other and laughed.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Sally said. She went to a desk in the living room and reappeared with something in her hand. “Look what I found.” It was a photo of the two of us from my first visit to California, taken outside on the patio of the house off Mulholland, the espalier behind us. I remembered Sid taking it, his knees apart and flexed, his face hidden. “Big future!” he had said to make us smile.

“I'm going to frame it,” Sally said.

I didn't look like Joni Mitchell. I had her hair but not her cheekbones; my eyes were less intelligent and more avid than hers. But Sally, just as I remembered, looked like a pretty farmgirl. It was a surprise to think that face came out of Los Angeles. There in the photo was our amazing unformedness, our round faces peering—in something like flirtation—at the world. We looked as innocent and unknowing as two tomatoes. We thought we knew so much. Yet what did we know then, really? We knew we planned to grow up and find love. We knew we adored our fathers. We knew we were best friends.

I looked up to see Sally making her way slowly across the kitchen, arms laden with peppers and onions, a canister of salt tucked under her chin and a caulifower in her hand. “Good grief, Sally,” I said, relieving her of the cauliflower and salt, “haven't you heard of a cry for help?”

She fell apart one night on that visit. I was teasing her about a neighbor whose wife had moved to Manitoba, and she rose up in anguished fury.

“He's not a potential partner for me, Clare. First off, he's not Jewish, and I'm going to all the trouble of dealing with Salt Lake to get a Jewish divorce, and secondly, I couldn't take another partner now, Clare, I'm, I'm—” Suddenly, inexplicably, Sally began to cry. “I'm scarred, Clare, I'm horribly scarred.”

Everybody then was talking about childhood sexual abuse, and the thought flew into my mind that Sid, dirty awful Sid, had forced himself on his daughter. Perhaps she was just now remembering. The trauma of Peter's leaving had squeezed the memory out. She could finally call him a vegetable. “Oh, Sally,” I said, “I'm so sorry.” I could tell her now, I realized, what Sid had told me about Ben. Let her know how irredeemable her father was.

She was still sobbing. “I miss them so much,” she said, sniffing. “So much.” She hesitated and sniffed again. “Last week I was out walking toward town with the kids, and we went near this development they're building, and . . . there were cranes and dump trucks. The kids got all excited watching them, and I walked up and asked one of the construction guys what they were doing, and”—she sniffed again—“they were digging a pool!” She broke out in fresh sobs, almost keening.

“A pool? You mean a fishing pond?”

“A swimming pool.” Sally sniffed.

“You found that sad.” Somehow I never imagined a swimming pool in Idaho.

“I know it sounds ridiculous, it just hit me. I told the kids something had blown into my eye. But I was thinking about the house off Mulholland, and how when we moved in, the pool wasn't built, and later I remember the cranes and the dump trucks and how excited Ben was, he must have been about two, and he ran around the family room saying, ‘Tuck! Tuck!' And Daddy put him on his shoulders and carried him outside to watch, and Mommy and I stood in the door to the garage. That's what I remembered. It hit me then that my family is gone, really gone, and even though I have all these kids, they'll never know my family, so in a way they'll never know me, because they don't know me with my family. I don't have a context for my children.”